Lovelace

In her years of notoriety, the porn star Linda Lovelace had a fevered, glazed neediness about her, a quality that makes it easy to avoid ever seeing (or ever wanting to see) "Deep Throat." In her later years, as an antipornography spokeswoman, this neediness transformed into the covered, professional aura of someone who'd come to terms with her life, who had worked to find her inner value. From working-class origins, Lovelace also seemed like someone who'd had to learn the hard way how to navigate in the big world.

Amanda Seyfried, who portrays her in Rob Epstein and Jeff Friedman's compelling new film, "Lovelace," has a whole other atmosphere. She seems like someone from a relatively comfortable background, someone who has been loved all her life, so when called upon to play an unloved person, she can't really go to that place. She can only imagine how awful she might feel, as a loved person, to be suddenly unloved, which is something else entirely. She plays Lovelace as sad, like someone who knows what she's missing, rather than as someone who is utterly lost and doesn't even know it.

But if Seyfried's Lovelace isn't quite the real Lovelace, she is nonetheless a sympathetic and fascinating locus for the film, which tells a miserable, dispiriting story, but does it so well that the experience is galvanizing, not depressing. Perhaps what makes it galvanizing is that this woman - as abused and publicly humiliated as any public figure of the last 50 years - is finally getting her say, albeit (and so typical of her luck) from beyond the grave. She died after a car wreck in 2002.

A very bad choice

The whole story, in just five words: Linda met the wrong guy. Oh, did she ever. As a teenager in Florida, she makes the acquaintance of Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who runs a topless bar, where the girls turn tricks on the side. Traynor charms her and provides her with the opportunity to escape her loving but remote father and her harsh, cold mother (played to perfection by Sharon Stone). Linda marries Traynor - and if she never made another mistake for the rest of her life, that would have been enough to push her straight into a ditch.

As played by Sarsgaard, Traynor is a sporadically engaging, psychologically tortured sadist. If you go on YouTube and see the real Traynor in documentary footage, he seems more like a garden-variety thug, but no matter. Sarsgaard's Traynor matches Seyfried's Linda, and, in any case, is more interesting than a flat-out brute - he's brutish enough as it is.

According to "Lovelace," it was Traynor who taught Linda how to perform the act for which she was to become famous, and it was Traynor who discovered that his wife had no gag reflex. In the world of porn, that's the equivalent of being able to hit an E-flat over high C.

The screenplay adopts an unusual strategy. First it tells Linda's story, and it's bad enough. Then it goes back and tells the same story, this time filling in the blanks, and it's indescribably worse. Even then, the movie skirts over Linda's decision to get into porn, probably because it's hard to imagine Seyfried's Linda being so lost (or so terrorized) that she'd agree to it. The 8mm peep-show films that she and Traynor made before "Deep Throat" aren't mentioned.

"Lovelace" is based on Linda's autobiography, "Ordeal" - you know life hasn't been easy when "Ordeal" is the name of your autobiography - which she wrote under her real name, Linda Boreman. In it, she describes incidents of such awfulness that her publisher insisted she take a polygraph test before they agreed to publish it. She passed the test.

Supportive filmmakers

The filmmakers follow Linda's account and are entirely in Linda's corner, perhaps more than she actually deserved, although "deserve" is a funny word in this context. Even if a quarter of what Boreman claimed was true, she had a lot more coming to her than a sympathetic hearing and much prettier actress playing her onscreen. She practically deserved an apology from the male sex, and that, in a way, is what this movie is.

The early 1970s styles are faithfully rendered, and so are the attitudes, and they don't make you want to go back in time, which is fitting in this case. Two small quibbles: Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" is from 1975 and doesn't belong on the soundtrack. And James Franco is 10 years too young and not nearly awkward enough to play Hugh Hefner, circa 1971. The whole fun of Hefner was that men could look at him and think, "I'm cooler than that guy." But no idea or inspiration could make someone look like Franco, only good luck.